The Piksel festival is 10 years and they celebrated with a series of events through the year, culminating in the PIKSEL[X] festival which opened today, and runs from 22-25 November 2012.

The festival subtitle ‘Kernel Panic!’ is connecting to the Piksel festivals origin of Linux based development, and describes what happens when the operating system is overloaded and goes to a full halt to protect itself from further damage. This can serve as a metaphor for the situation today when our common operating system is more and more getting close to a full breakdown. The economy crisis, global warming, social turmoil and wars are accelerating into a global state of emergency which is a serious threat to the infrastructure that holds our civilization together. The resulting state of operation is chaotic and unpredictable.

PIKSEL[X] presents a wide variety of expressions that represent various strategies for how young artists of today experience and relate to the changing times. More information: http://www.piksel.no/p12/

Piksel is an annual event for artists and developers working with free and open source software, hardware and art. Part workshop, part festival, it is organised in Bergen, Norway, and involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects, doing workshops, performances and discussions on the aesthetics and politics of free and open source software. Piksel is a member of the Pixelache network of electronic art festivals, and one of the nodes in the Production Network for Electronic Art in Norway – PNEK